As the holiday hosting of visitors has finally drawn to a tapering close, I have yet to dismantle the ornaments, the tree, the garlands and lights. Today, today, yes, it must be today. I have as much relish for the packing of boxes as a democratic senator does for confirming Sam Alito to the Supreme Court, but it will be done, sooner or later. And in Mecca they have the hundreds of bodies of the trampled to attend to. Irony costs nothing for the viewer and everything for the participant. It rains. Our backyard is a delta of runoff. Mothers drove the minivans to the bus stop today to pick up the kids and drive the fifty yards back home. I got a late start, backing out of the driveway when my kids leapt out of the automatically opening side door of a neighbor's minivan, my daughter shouting, "How could you forget us again?" Too much to keep in mind. I finished a book recently, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, by V.S. Ramachandran, a smart neuroscientist with amazing news about how our brains work (and terribly bad jokes about George W. and academia, as if to relieve the intensity of having to decipher his jargon by making us wince). Meanwhile, I burned myself out with writing in the last month. I published something today on SpeakUp. And since the morning, I've posted comments about the business of design:

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There are the individual designers trying to make a living by seeking work; they have to sell themselves (timeliness, flexibility), their abilities (Java, Illustrator), and the work itself (whatever the "style"). The burden for finding paying work is placed on the individual. The employer/magazine, etc., hunts a little, too (sourcebooks, market guides, word of mouth). This is the day-to-day dynamic we're all familiar with. The narratives here meet in a kind of center: the employer seeks good people, tries to avoid bad workers while the designer seeks good employers, tries to avoid getting screwed over. There is signaling, the waving of hands and pay rates, and somehow the two come together in temporary economic relationships. The narratives here are personal: designers see from within their own life stories while the employers from theirs. Hence the conflict between what the designer wants for a good working life and what the employer wants for an efficient and profitable enterprise.

Long-winded. Sorry.

Okay so the next level is one that looks from the point of view of Design, that is, the story of design as its practice and aesthetics have evolved over time. Here you get style trends. You get the good and bad habits of individual designers collectively viewed from above to suggest in toto some kind of grand movement (made up of strands of little movements). All of Design's particles make up its wave (or at least individuals may attempt to imagine such a theoretical narrative and impart to one's own conception of it a structure or progression that can be expressed in shorthand, as in Modernism to Postmodernism, Garamond to Grunge, etc.). It may be that from this view it doesn't seem so hard for an individual to absorb discrete expressions of historical style, tongue them up into little paper balls, and spit them through the straw of one's working life at the screens and brochures of whomever's buying. It doesn't seem hard to do this, I agree. And your opinion that designers who refuse to do this are "navelgazers" (i.e. unreasonably inflexible) stems from the premise that designers today need to see themselves neither from Design's point of view nor from their own point of view but, instead, only from the employer's point of view: designers should ideally act like a cheap straw with a big box of stylistic spitballs. This is, in one way, what many freelancers (designers, writers, artists) do to survive, but while it's theoretically benign from the employer's point of view, it is, in practice and from the freelancer's point of view, rather back-breaking and mind-hollowing to pull off.

What I mean: I've written for magazines for over a decade. I write a while, then I quit. Then I come back and write awhile (money! credit! whee!), then I quit. Working for myself is what produces some good stuff, and then I decide, "Hey, I should make some money," and then I start trying to write TO magazines. I absorb. I adopt. I mimic. (It's a uniquely human capacity, mimickry having to do with certain neurons in the brain; sorry, been reading lately.) Anyway, I feel emptied out after a while and so need to quit. In other words, seeing one's own work from the points of view of others (employers, Design, Literature, History, etc.) is an outside-in perspective on one's own value. Adopting the incentives of others works only so long before the balloon of optimism inside you deflates. This is the point where people revert to quotations. This is where the psychological burden of juggling jobs and styles and external demands drains your economic life as well (and may result in poor work the employer might notice).

Shit, I'm long-winded today. Almost done.

So while it's theoretically possible to spitball your work according to the whims of employers, it's dangerously dehumanizing to the person in practice. There are other perspectives in which to value one's own work that do not depend on the ability to work god-like miracles on a quick turnaround for $10/hour. The obstacles, however, are great for the individual to surmount precisely because the economic dynamic today is rather hostile to the individual freelancer, which is why it's easy to accuse me of idealism in arguing for the individual perspective. But I think the economic perspective (seeing the dynamic from the employer's point of view) has all the support it needs. I don't think companies or the market needs any cheerleading from the little guy. It could really care less. Of course, the market would reward (barely) designers who could be all things, all the time. That's the given. The question, as you bring up, is why then shouldn't we try? The answer: because we don't want to.

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[Greg then responded, nicely, and suggested he didn't see where we disagreed. I responded:]
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But, Greg, your summing up of your opinion expresses exactly where we disagree. You are resigned to the status quo of reaction: client need dictates your response. A tap on the knee, and you kick up a website, a brochure, a logo. I don't doubt that this practice exists. As I say, many freelancers (writers, designers, illustrators) do this to survive (hell, I do it all the time; but then again I can burn this kind of work to ashes and feel nothing). Anyway, I don't see how accepting this is the means to "something new." You're making a virtue of a vice. I do admit, however, that my view depends on the skull of the designer actually containing the intractable throb of a yearning. The yearning has to do with a desire to do good work, both objectively and subjectively. It doesn't have to be satisfying. Good work can poke your finger and make you bleed and want to try again. Work isn't an ice-cream sundae for the soul. But I have met folks, not necessarily designers, who simply don't have the desire to do any specific thing. They just want money or honor or compliments or status. This kind of person is your kind of designer. It's not mine. And let's be clear: I'm talking about a kind of creative person I would like to be and that I would hold up within whatever creative field as a good model. This model may be at odds with what the employer is looking for. In fact, almost by definition it will be because employers don't want the messiness of personality at all; they want the efficiency of work product. So I still think you're looking at yourself from the employer's point of view, not from your own. You don't need a new idea. You need your own work. And I can't think of a more challenging project: creating your own personality through work.